Centering Disability Justice (excerpt)

Centering Disability Justice
(excerpt - footnotes omitted)

Natalie M. Chin

Syracuse Law Review (2021)     

1. Education

        A. Judge Rotenberg Educational Center

In March 2020, following decades of lawsuits, grassroots organizing, political efforts, and the documented deaths, suicides, and torture of students enrolled at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center[1] (JRC or “the Center”), the  Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a prohibition on the Center’s policy of using electric shock devices to correct “self-injurious or aggressive behavior.”[2] In administering electric shock to its residents, JRC used the graduatedelectronic decelerator (GED). The GED allowed a JRC employee to push a button that is connected to a device that is attached to a JRC resident.[3] The device sends an electric shock at differing intensity levels.[4] Residents on average received two shocks a week, with some residents receiving ten to thirty per week.[5] Effects of the GED on residents included burns, suicidal ideation, anxiety, aggression, loss of sensation in the limbs.[6]

The decision by the FDA to prohibit electronic shock devices targeted this practice by the JRC, which is a self-proclaimed day and residential school.[7] It enrolls students from age five through adults who are labeled as “emotionally disturbed,” intellectually disabled, or on the autism spectrum and exhibit “behavioral, emotional, and/or psychiatric problems.”[8] It is the only facility in the country that uses electric shocks as a routine disciplinary measure for students.[9] To understand both the belatedness and gravity of the FDA’s decision, some background is necessary.

The struggle to end the use of electronic shock at JRC spans decades.[10] It involves a prolonged fight by Autistic self-advocates, disability, and parent advocates to close JRC, an institution created in 1971.[11] In an open public hearing of the FDA in 2014, the Director of Research at JRC testified in support of the use of electronic shock as a successful method to “treat . . . behavior disorder,” noting that the application of the electronic shock on students caused pain, but no harm.[12] JRC’s testimony took place just one year after the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture published a report that determined that the use of electronic shock and physical restraints at JRC violated the United Nations Convention on Torture.[13] The report urged the U.S. government to investigate and address these human rights violations.[14] The fight to end the use of electric shock therapy gained short-lived national attention when a grainy black and white video surfaced, ten years after its original recording in 2002, showing a young man with his four limbs spread outward, tied to a restraint board.[15] In the video, you can hear his voice pleading, “[p]lease stop, please stop.”[16] His body is writhing as he screams while several people lean over and around him.[17]

The video shows Andre McCollins, a young Black man who was eighteen-year-old at the time and living at the JRC.[18] In the video, McCollins was given “31 electronic shocks as punishment for misbehaving” as part of the Center’s “behavior modification program.”[19] The experience left burns on McCollins’s arms and legs,[20] and emotional and psychological harm.[21] McCollins’s mother fought in court for the release of this video.[22] The footage led to a 2012 lawsuit against the Center and an extended jury trial, which disclosed that “ [a]ll but one of [the 31] shocks . . . was for tensing up or screaming, in anticipation of or response to shocks or restraints, while the other shock he received was for failure to remove his coat.”[23] The case ended in a settlement before the jury reached a verdict.[24] 

Throughout the years of advocacy challenging JRC and its treatment of students, little attention was given by media,[25] federal and state government agencies,[26] and disability rights advocacy groups[27] that the majority of students at JRC are low-income, Black, and brown.[28] Based on publicly available data examined from 2002, when McCollins was a student at JRC, until 2018, the Center had a stark increase in the number of Black and Hispanic students compared to white students.[29] For example, Black student enrollment went from 39.32% of the student population in 2002 to 52.89% in 2018.[30] In contrast, white student enrollment saw a marked decrease from 2002, comprising about 35.95% of the student population to about 17.36% of the student enrollment in 2018, according to the latest publicly available data.[31] This 2018 data further reflects that 52% of students at the Judge Rotenberg Center were Black, 27% were Hispanic, and 17% were white.[32]

When you consider the JRCs’ total enrollment over the sixteen-year-period from 2002 to 2018, students of color (identified by JRC as American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic, and Black) consistently made up more than 60% of the student population.[33] Between 2011–18, the trend at JRC showed a marked increase in students of color, making up about 80% of the student population in 2018.[34]

The documented accounts of torture by survivors of JRC spanned years.[35] Decades before using electric shock on its residents, JRC held a long track record of using “extremely prolonged restraint, food deprivation, deep muscle pinching, forced inhalation of ammonia, and sensory assault techniques,” for what it described as “behavioral modification.”[36]

While the FDA banned the use of electric shock after decades of protests, lives ruined, and deaths, a federal appeals court vacated the final rule the following year,[37] allowing the practice to continue. JRC remains a benefactor of government funding.[38] The Center remains open with a $70 million annual revenue,[39] and an Executive Director salary of $321,000.[40]

JRC represents the embodiment of racism/ableism sanctioned by the federal government to legitimize the social control of the disabled Black and brown body/mind. Residents as young as five years old to adulthood are categorized through the label of intellectual and developmental disability with “large numbers of people whose primary neurodivergence is psychiatric disability or mental illness, many of whom arrive through referrals from the juvenile criminal legal system.”[41] 

As expressed by Shain M. Neumeier and Lydia X. Z. Brown, “[t]his particular blend of ableist and racist targeting . . . call[s] into question how and why so many activists working publicly against JRC have little to no understanding of the racial implications of JRC’s population and increasingly overt ties to the criminal punishment system . . . .” [42] The explicit targeting by JRC of the racialized population is reflected in JRC enrollment documents over the past twenty years, and through recruitment tactics.

These tactics include outreach to criminal court judges and probation officers, as well as targeting new students to enter JRC from New York juvenile jails and Rikers Island.[43] The  recruiting efforts employed further define JRC as a government sanctioned player in the eugenics pipeline that segregates, confiscates, and discards the racialized disabled bodymind as a means of social control.